All posts by Michael_Bottles_SH

A date wine should be many things; easy-to-love but sophisticated, fun but with serious credentials. A summer date wine should be all that plus something that feels great with overpowering Shanghai sunshine. No easy feat.

So, here are a handful of suggestions along with some ‘date-pairing’ tips for the more romanticaly challenged.

Salads! The struggling foodie’s crutch and that perfect summer dish that we all say we should eat more often. If you’re looking for more inspiration to eat healthy, this could be the answer: do it with wine.

Good salads are by nature delicate and subtle, so pairing them with wine can be tricky, but it’s definitely doable. In general, it makes things easer if you take your dressings in to account as well. Think about which dressing flavors will complement your ingredients and the wine will follow.

Magnum bottles seem to occupy a strange place in the minds of wine lovers. They are harder to get, for one thing, and sometimes they suffer from a reputation as cheap, ostentatious and unnecessary. But, in some cases when it comes to wine, bigger sometimes really is better.

We all know that when it comes to wines, champagne always, somehow, manages to stand out. There are many reasons for this; it’s captured people’s imaginations in ways that few other wines have and become synonymous with celebration and good times.

But it all starts, of course, with how the wine is made. It’s a relatively well known that wines can only bear the mantle of champagne if they come from the Champagne region, but there is also a very strict, (and fascinating), method that goes in to making it.

One of Shanghai dining’s biggest challenges is finding foreign food that matches what you remember from home. Despite the amount of pizza and pasta you can find here, this applies to Italian food too. Which is why we wanted to talk to a local chef who’s bringing the cuisine of Italy, with a palatable homegrown flair, to Shanghai’s more discerning diners.

This Saturday is July 4th, aka Independence Day, aka America’s b-day. It’s the perfect excuse to celebrate by indulging in some cuisine from the U.S. of A. Whatever you think about their food, you can’t deny that it’s hearty, heavy and – often – pretty delicious. Check below for a list of some of America’s finest contributions to the culinary world; and a few ideas for the wines that we think will pair with them best.